Roger Goodell says NFL needs changes to Rooney Rule
play
Ad (0:15)
Jan 29, 2020
- Dan GrazianoESPN Staff Writer
MIAMI -- The NFL has a minority-coach-hiring problem, and commissioner Roger Goodell knows it.
Goodell held his annual Super Bowl week news conference Wednesday, and one of the questions he fielded was about the lack of opportunity for minority coaches. Of the five teams with head coach openings this offseason, only the
Washington Redskins hired a minority candidate, Ron Rivera. Last year, eight teams hired new head coaches, and Brian Flores of the
Miami Dolphins was the only minority candidate who got one of the jobs.
"Clearly, we are not where we want to be on this issue," Goodell said. "We have a lot of work that's gone into not only the Rooney Rule, but our policies overall. It's clear we need to change and do something different. There's no reason to expect that we're going to have a different outcome next year without those kinds of changes, and we've already begun engaging in those changes."
EDITOR'S PICKS
Goodell offered few specifics on the changes he's discussing. But he indicated he's soliciting a number of outside sources to discuss whether the league needs to revise the Rooney Rule, the longstanding requirement that teams interview at least one minority candidate for head coach and general manager openings.
"Not just with our diversity committee, not just with the Fritz Pollard alliance, but others, and trying to figure out what steps we can take next that would lead to better outcomes," Goodell said. "So we will have a series of meetings, which we've already scheduled, over the next month to get that kind of dialogue going, to continue the dialogue and to try to determine what are the solutions, so we can have those better outcomes."
Flores, the
Pittsburgh Steelers' Mike Tomlin and the
Los Angeles Chargers' Anthony Lynn are the league's only African-American head coaches. Rivera, who is Hispanic, makes it four total minority head coaches out of 32. Chris Grier of the Dolphins and Andrew Berry of the
Cleveland Browns, who was
hired this week, are the only two African-American general managers.
On Wednesday night,
San Francisco 49ers cornerback
Richard Sherman was asked if he believes African-American players should speak out more during the offseason coaching carousel to help generate more opportunities for minority coaches.
Sherman, who has been speaking out on the topic for years, made it clear that he's said as much as he can say but it hasn't seemed to help. He then challenged the media to hold the people who make the hiring decisions -- in this case NFL owners, team presidents and general managers -- more accountable for the lack of minority candidates getting interviews and jobs.
"I put more of the responsibility on you -- on the media," Sherman said. "Because you're asking people who have no say in it. You're asking players, we literally have no say in who gets hired, who gets fired. We have no say in whether we get hired or fired. But the people who have say, we don't pressure. The owners, we don't call, we don't push to get them; when you have them in the media, nobody asks them the hard questions because you don't want to rub them the wrong way, you don't want to get on their bad side.
"So I almost say it's your fault that we don't have those answers, because none of you are asking the hard questions. Everybody feels comfortable asking a player a hard question about, 'Man, why aren't these black coaches getting jobs?' Ask the dudes who hire them. Ask the dudes who have all the power in the world to hire and fire these men. Then you'll get the answers. Or maybe we're not looking for the answers in those dudes, because we kinda know what they are."
Goodell addressed a variety of topics during his annual address, including the following:
• The prospect of expanding the regular season from 16 games to 17, as owners have proposed to the players during negotiations on a new collective bargaining agreement.
Goodell continued to insist that the season would not be expanded but rather "restructured," since any additional regular-season games would mean a reduction in the number of preseason games. But players, of course, don't play in all preseason games, or the entirety of the games they do play, and an extra regular-season game would obviously mean an increased toll on the body and increased injury risk.
"We believe we have made the game safer; we've made it better," Goodell said. "And we believe that we can restructure the seasons in a way that will be smart for the future of the game. Those discussions are in context of our labor negotiations. They're in the context of working with our medical people. And we've shared all that. We continue to have that kind of dialogue with our players, and we'll continue to have that."
• His own future plans.
Goodell turns 61 next month and has held his current job since 2006.
"I haven't thought about retiring," he said. "It's not on my agenda. We have too much to do, and I think too many great things are happening in this league right now. At some point, I am going to retire, and that day is probably closer than it was yesterday. But I'm not focused on that at all. I'm 100 percent committed to this job."
• The league's investigation into the
New England Patriots, who admitted to illegally videotaping the
Cincinnati Bengals' sideline during a game.
"Our responsibility is to make sure we're being extremely thorough," he said. "We have a responsibility to 31 other clubs. We have a responsibility to fans to understand all of what happened and make sure that something we don't know happened didn't happen. Our team has been on it. We have been focused on this. I think it has not been that lengthy of a time. We have obviously put the focus on it, but we're going to get it right. And when we come to a conclusion, we'll certainly make sure people are aware of it."
